After Robert Montgomery passed away in 1981, Kemp on several occasions spent time with Skip and his family and found him to be “a charming man, very like his father.” She was sad when he died “far too young,” succumbing to lung cancer in 2000, and she still has infrequent contact with his family.
Bicoastal from birth, in their youth, Lizzie and Skip were at home among Hollywood stars and the East Coast upper crust. They both attended elite private educational facilities that provided solid preparation for their adulthood. But while Skip left Hollywood behind, Lizzie delved right into the mix of it, helped along by that refined academic background.
From September of 1939 to June of 1950, she attended the Westlake School for Girls, an exclusive elementary academic hall in Beverly Hills. From September 1950 to June of 1951, she was enrolled at the aristocratic Spence School for Girls (where she played field hockey) in New York City.
The following information for both facilities was gathered from their respective websites:
In October 1989, the Boards of Trustees of both the Westlake School for Girls and the Harvard School, a military school for boys that was established in 1900, agreed to merge the facilities. Today, Harvard-Westlake School is an independent coeducational college preparatory day school, grades 7–12, that ultimately commenced in September of 1991. In 2010, 566 of its students took 1,736 A.P. tests in 30 different subjects, and 90% scored 3 or higher. The school ranks among the top high schools in the country in number of National Merit Semifinalists. In the class of 2011, there were 90 students who received National Merit Recognition, with 28 students as National Merit Semifinalists.
Clara Spence, a visionary educator, founded her Spence School for Girls in 1892, welcoming ten students to a brownstone on West 48th Street in New York City. The outside world of politics, the arts, and the community was embraced in her school and from the beginning Spence girls developed a keen sense of self-confidence and assumed their roles as significant members of the community. The facilities motto, “Not for school but for life we learn,” has defined a Spence education throughout its long history. Or as Spence herself once said of her renowned facility it was “a place not of mechanical instruction, but a school of character where the common requisites for all have been human feeling, a sense of humor, and the spirit of intellectual and moral adventure.
All of which describes Lizzie in spades.
Actress June Lockhart, best known for her iconic roles as the intergalactic mother Maureen Robinson on TV’s Lost in Space (CBS, 1965–1968) and the kindly country physician, Dr. Janet Craig on Petticoat Junction (CBS, 1963– 1970), played an integral role in Lizzie’s life.
Before her stops in Space and at Junction, she was guest-star on Bewitched in a first-season episode called “Little Pitchers Have Big Fears” which co-starred Jimmy Mathers, brother to Jerry Mathers, better known as The Beaver on Leave It to Beaver (CBS/ABC, 1957–1963).
Years before her Bewitched guest-spot, Lockhart made nine appearances on Robert Montgomery Presents. She is the daughter of actors Gene and Kathleen Lockhart who portrayed Mr. and Mrs. Bob Cratchit in the 1938 film edition of A Christmas Carol, in which June played one of the Cratchit children. Reginald Owen who, decades later guest starred on Bewitched as Ockie, boyfriend to Marion Lorne’s Aunt Clara (and Admiral Boom in 1964’s Mary Poppins movie), played Scrooge.
What’s more, June’s father Gene was good friends with Lizzie’s father Robert, both of whom were instrumental in the founding of the Screen Actors Guild (S.A.G.). Gene also made four appearances on Robert Montgomery Presents, of which three were with June (and directed by Grey Lockwood). Meanwhile, Kathleen Lockhart had a small role in Robert Montgomery’s 1946 film, The Lady in the Lake.
Although June did not appear with Lizzie in any episodes of Presents, she recalls:
I used to watch her work. And I remember seeing her once in rehearsal. She was very professional, and her reputation for always doing live TV was legendary. And the directors that I worked with, who had also worked with her, said she was just a joy and lots of fun. And that was my experience with her when I did Bewitched. Both she and Bill Asher were fun to work with. We shot the episode at the Rancho Golf Course on Pico Blvd. and Motor Avenue [in West Los Angeles]. There wasn’t a dressing room for Elizabeth or me. So I joked with her and asked, What are we supposed to do? Change in the front seat of the car? But then a short time later, the crew brought in a few portable dressing rooms. I was just glad I didn’t have to change outside on Motor Avenue.
However, June’s stint on Bewitched is not her most vivid recollection of Elizabeth. That part of her memory is savored from another time, decades before, when they both attended the Westlake School for Girls in Beverly Hills. Although June was a senior and Lizzie was just in kindergarten, the two crossed paths one very special morning when only four people in the world—June, Elizabeth, Miss Carol Mills, the Westlake principal, and a very uniformed Robert Montgomery—were there to experience what June now reveals for the first time anywhere:
In the middle of World War II, Robert Montgomery was in the South Pacific, I believe as Lt. Commander or higher. So, one day, there we were, Elizabeth and I, both at Westlake. I was coming back from the Borders wing on campus, back over to the classrooms and Miss Mills was standing next to Elizabeth, outside where the circle driveway was. I greeted them both and Ms. Mills said, Wait here a minute, June. So I stood with them and asked, What’s going on? And she said, You’ll see. And within a few moments a car pulled up and out got Robert Montgomery in full uniform, back from a very long trip overseas in the South Pacific. Upon seeing her father get out of the car Elizabeth, with screams of delight, ran towards him. And he picked her up in his arms and hugged her so tight. He then came over to Miss Mills and I, greeted us, and then got back in the car with Elizabeth and drove away. Of course there were tears on our cheeks after seeing this great reunion between Elizabeth and her father. And he came to pick her up in the middle of the school day … and there was nobody else around … there were no other students milling about; no one. Just Miss Mills, me, and Elizabeth. And I remember that day clearly, even so vividly I can remember where the sun was at the time. It must have been maybe 11:30 or 12 noon. And of course no one was let out of school in the middle of the day unless it was really very important. So Miss Mills and I just looked at each other and it was a sweet wonderful warm moment that we had just witnessed. A very exciting moment, too, because we later learned that Robert Montgomery had just returned not only from the South Pacific but [that] it was a very important business. He did not just come back on leave, where he would be home for a month or so, and then have to go back. It wasn’t like that. He was back for good. And whatever work he was involved with in the South Pacific was very top secret.
After revealing this story, June laughs in irony upon learning that Lizzie’s first episode of Robert Montgomery Presents was titled “Top Secret,” in which she played none other than the daughter to her father’s character, a spy, who teamed together for a covert adventure in a foreign land.
In January 1965, Elizabeth talked to reporter Eunice Field and TV Radio Mirror magazine for the article, “Elizabeth Montgomery: You Know Her as a Witch, Now Meet Her as a Woman.” “I’m afraid I gave my teachers gray hair,” she said, “because all I could think of was Dramatics.”
But it was her mother who saved her from getting Ds in every subject; she’d permit little Lizzie to take part in school plays only if her daughter maintained a B average. Miss Mills, Lizzie’s headmistress at Westlake, would call the Montgomery child into her office and say, “You’re not stupid. You need to apply yourself and you can get all A’s.” Lizzie would curtsy and reply, “Yes, Ma’am,” and then go to the drama department instead of the library as she had promised, all of which became a weekly ritual.
“I spent half my time in the headmistress’s office,” she admitted to TV Guide in 1961, “and the other half,” she said, in the drama department. Her classmates included the disting
uished daughters of actors Spencer Tracy, Herbert Marshall, and Alan Mowbray, and classical pianist Arthur Ruben-stein (father to actor John Rubenstein, who later co-starred with Bewitched guest-star Jack Warden on the 1980s CBS series, Crazy Like a Fox).
But Lizzie was unimpressed. She was bored with school, and always knew that she “wanted to be actress.”
Beyond her homebound performance as Snow White, her first public theatrical performance would be at Westlake, when she was just 6, in that French language production of Little Red Riding Hood. “Naturally,” she had said of this early endeavor, “I already knew enough to go to Daddy for professional advice.”
According to TV Radio Mirror in January 1965, he told her, “Forget about acting, Honey. Just think you really are the wolf and act the way you think a wolf would act.” It was her introduction to method acting.
Slightly less appreciative may have been the faculty of Westlake. Miss Mills may have been correct. Lizzie was a good student but she didn’t always work as hard as she could have. It didn’t help that she had a penchant for bringing unusual pets to class. According to Modern Screen magazine in 1965, one Easter she received a pig which, “horribly enough,” she called Pork Chop. Her instructor was not too sure how to cope with that and was even more perturbed when Lizzie arrived in class with Chinese hooded rats.
The rodent business began when her mother once traveled east by train to see her husband, Robert Montgomery. Lizzie accompanied Mrs. Montgomery to the station, where she noticed a little boy walking around the station with one of the Chinese hooded rats on his shoulder. Lizzie announced that it was just the thing to have as her mother boarded the train. But Elizabeth Allen’s last and very definite word was no … until, of course, the following Christmas when her daughter received two tiny animals as gifts she named Connie and Otis.
From there, the things just multiplied like crazy, she said, and at one point she owned approximately fifteen rats at once. “They used to get out of their cages and we were always counting noses, tails, and whiskers to be sure we had them all.”
On one of those days when Connie and Otis were let lose in the Montgomery abode, Allen asked Lizzie to place her new playthings back in their cage. To which Lizzie replied, “But I want one to sleep on my bed.”
“You can’t sleep with the rat, Elizabeth.”
“The dog sleeps on the bed.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Well, you might roll over on it.”
The wise Lizzie child was finally convinced to place her pet rat, be it Connie or Otis, back in its gilded environment, although not for long.
One evening the Montgomery family was entertaining guests, as they were prone to do, and little Elizabeth came down from her room for a meet and greet. She did everything expected of a young lady of her stature: curtsied and politely introduced herself, saying, “How do you do?”
Then the unexpected happened, causing one unsuspecting female guest to let out a shriek and drop her martini. Two little rat heads peeked out from behind Lizzie’s hair bows and two skinny rat tails were protruding on either side.
“Elizabeth, try to keep the rats upstairs,” murmured Mrs. Montgomery.
Her poor mother! At one point they had three dogs, two cats, a white duck called “Pittosporum,” some alligators, and a cockatiel named “Nankypoo.” The problem was Nankypoo, which her parents had given her. As Lizzie remembered in Modern Screen, 1965, her mother was always saying, “Will you please make sure the bird stays upstairs?” If that sounds like a wild thing to say about a bird, it’s because Nankypoo was never in his cage. He was always walking around, following some unsuspecting individual. In fact, he never flew; he walked. “He’d get up on top of doors but he wouldn’t fly,” Lizzie said.
If that wasn’t enough, another time, Nankypoo walked into the living room, walked up to the coffee table, hopped up on the edge of the table, and then onto a certain female visitor’s glass and proceeded to drink it nearly dry. Lizzie always thought it might have been the same woman who dropped her martini over her rats, because this time she and all the other women in the room screamed loudly. Nankypoo had walked across the table, hopped to the floor, walked two feet and fell flat. “He must have had a dreadful hangover next day,” she mused.
A few years after those early spirited days at Westlake, Lizzie, at 17, embarked on her final semester with the school and faced a tough decision. Her family was leaving Los Angeles, and she could either remain at Westlake or enroll for a year at the Spence School for Girls in New York. The thought of being separated from her family was one she could not imagine. So she left Westlake and went to Spence where, she said, they were “very dear” to her, and where she enrolled in various courses in French and architecture that she called “interesting.”
After attending the Spence School, she spent two years studying acting at that same city’s renowned American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her charismatic charms were surely visible to audiences at this early stage, but her student performances drew the most stringent commentary from her father. He would send her curt, disapproving notes for performances that he deemed less than worthy. “Not good enough,” he would scribble. “Try again.”
“Daddy listens to my ideas, and then criticizes,” she told TV People and Pictures Magazine in October 1953. “It’s all impersonal and constructive.”
According to People Magazine in 1995, Lizzie once said, “Like Daddy, I try to be neat, concise in my work, and in anything else for that matter.”
In 1989, however, she laughed and said her father’s response to her chosen profession was, “Oh, shit!”
“That was the first time I had ever heard that word. And I was no more than six years old.”
But they were still chums, at least from when she was a child until she became a star on her own and of her own show. As she conveyed to TV People and Pictures in 1953, “We’re terrific companions and are so much alike. We love to Charleston together. And Daddy is the only one who can tire me out. Usually, I sit out the Charleston at a dance. It’s too strenuous for my dates.”
According to “Our Name Is Montgomery,” published in TeleVision Life Magazine, January 1954, Elizabeth dated her first boy at fourteen, when she and her family lived in an elegant white home in the Bel Air district of Beverly Hills. “Dad sort of scrutinized each young man when he came to call for me,” she said. “It was really sort of sad; they were all terrified of him. Sometimes he was a little cold, when he really disliked the boy, but most times he tried to make them feel at home.”
By the time she was twenty, she was on her own. Sometimes her mother asked her about the boys she dated, sometimes she didn’t. “I was brought up to be trusted,” Lizzie said.
In either case, Mrs. Montgomery didn’t wait up for her daughter to arrive home from a night out on the town. And as for marriage, it was far from Lizzie’s mind at the time. She wanted to first start her career. As if mimicking the plot of Bewitched that would debut ten years later, she added, “I really don’t think it’s fair to the man if he doesn’t know what he’s getting—an actress or a housewife.”
As played out in the pilot of Bewitched, Samantha didn’t reveal to Darrin that she was a witch until after they married.
Lizzie’s relationship with her parents, specifically, her father, was passive-aggressive, to say the least. Robert and his friends, like James Cagney, eventually assisted with her theatrical pursuits, but also became her toughest critics, even when it came to how she dressed and carried herself. According to the Ronald Haver interview in 1991, Robert’s primary acting advice to Lizzie was to listen to the other actors in a scene, while Cagney cautioned her about the way she walked. “Be sure you’re listening to what the other person is saying to you,” her father would tell her. Cagney advised, “Just learn your lines and just don’t bump into anything.”
Cagney once went as far as to say, “Elizabeth, you are the clumsiest person for a graceful person I’ve ever met i
n my life.” And she agreed. “I could ride (horses) like the wind,” she said. “I was very athletic. But trust me, to walk from here to that door I’d probably fall down three times. It was awful.”
But at least she’d fall gracefully, and looked good on her descent.
In 1988, Byron Munson, Bewitched’s costume designer, always said Lizzie had “horrible taste in clothes.” Maybe that’s because her father was never around. He had only visited the Samantha set a few times, and it was only once documented with a photo-op.
Ten years before Bewitched, however, he was there to adjust her sense of fashion. According to TV People and Pictures, October 1953, he’d tell her, “Never get flamboyant and always dress well.”
But at the end of that same month in 1953, she told TV Guide, “I like to fuss and primp before (a) party. Clothes have to fit right and be right so that I can concentrate on my date and not what I’m wearing.”
“Some parties are just impossible to figure out in advance,” she added. “Whenever I show up with shoulders bared, someone else is covered up to the neck. And then, when I cover up, no one else does.”
It all sounded like a plot on Bewitched. In fact, it was. Namely, the pilot episode in which Darrin’s former girlfriend Sheila Summers (Nancy Kovack) invites him and his new bride Samantha to a party Sheila claims would be “casual.” It ends up being nothing of the sort, and Sam is embarrassed in her less-than-formal wear. Then, in “Snob in the Grass,” from the fourth season, Sheila tricks her again. This time inviting the Stephenses to a formal party, but upon arrival in their finest duds, they see the other attendees in casual wear.
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